One of the areas where this problem has proven the most obvious, is in the use of OpenRocket as the only optimisation tool that student teams use when designing competition rockets. I've seen a number of projects fail because the young engineers working on them did a calculation or a simulation that came out with an answer that was wrong (often because they started with the wrong data or assumptions in the first place) but they simply don't have the experience in the field to be able to NOTICE that the result is wrong, so they have simply accepted it as the gospel truth (because "The computer told me it was right") and ended up having a horrific failure, but worst of all, no idea WHY they failed. Looking at the field in a wider context, there has also been a shift towards trusting simulation and calculation without question and often without enough scrutiny. Certainly, anyone not from an academic background, without a relevant masters or PHD, is completely worthless in helping develop new rocket technologies, irrelevant of whether they have built thousands of rockets or not. The letters after someone's name and the books they've read (or even better written) are the only useful gauge of whether they are worth speaking to or getting advice from. Whether it is the fault of the universities as a whole, or the lecturers that system has nurtured, students in engineering these days are all apparently taught that there is only value in academic qualification. We built and tested, solved problems in the field, re-designed and tested again. Back in the amateur space race era, this field was led by amateur teams, not tied to any universities, often these teams had some older and more experienced engineers in their ranks, who had all grown up building rockets and working in workshops to make things, so that was the methodology they applied to developing higher and higher performance rockets. ![]() It has also become VERY anti-practical testing or development. The UK's university education system has become VERY risk averse. but it is perhaps more useful to look at why that is the case? I would probably sound like a broken record if I complained again about the fact that, in the UK at least, students seem totally unaware of the rocketry work that went on 20+ years back that came very close to seeing a UK built amateur rocket reach space, and uninterested in learning from those who have already faced (and for the most part, solved) the problems they are facing right now. The massive growth (in the UK and globally) in student rocketry competitions has driven a desire to 'make a better rocket' that seems even greater than the drive that myself and my contemporaries had back during the 'amateur space race' of the late 1990's and early 2000's. ![]() Speed, altitude and performance are the end goals of most student rocket projects. With so few options for rocket flight simulation software in the world today, how SHOULD we be making sure that those only just entering this field get it right? "I feel the need. ![]() Having worked for decades now in both commercial, amateur and student rocketry, I've started to see a worrying trend towards trusting simulation and calculation over empirical data.
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